Anthropic’s Amodei shares plan to ‘slow the pace’ of advancing AI

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei published an essay on Saturday urging artificial intelligence companies to pace how quickly they improve model capabilities, a move that comes as a growing chorus of researchers have called for a coordinated deceleration.

The proposal for a voluntary slowdown brought together three figureheads of the AI industry in agreement, with SpaceX CEO Elon Musk and OpenAI chief Sam Altman throwing their support behind Amodei.

Amodei proposed a three-step plan that he said will help temper the pace of development without “sacrificing commercial advantage or the United States’ lead in AI,” though he conceded that some steps may be easier to achieve than others. Anthropic is actively gearing up for what is expected to be a historic IPO, though the company has not officially disclosed when it plans to debut.

The alignment of the three men shows how quickly concern over AI has moved from the margins to the center of the debate. Pressure is building in Washington, where lawmakers in both parties are calling for new AI safeguards and demanding tech leaders testify after a rash of cyberattacks were carried out without direct human control.

Beyond the nation’s capital, state and local officials are also confronting growing outrage against AI data centers and their demands on power, water and communities. With midterm elections approaching, AI is becoming a key issue for both parties.

Concerns around AI’s capabilities

Anthropic has “unilaterally” committed to the first step of the plan, Amodei said, which grants third-party evaluators employee-level access to the company to verify safety practices and report incidents. The second step encourages leading AI companies within democratic countries to coordinate and establish common safety standards, and the third calls for coordination between democratic governments and authoritarian governments.

“To be clear, pacing does not mean halting model training or technical progress, but ensuring companies take adequate time to align and safeguard their models, and for third party evaluators to confirm this,” Amodei wrote.

The essay landed after an Anthropic researcher set off a firestorm on social media this week by announcing he quit his job at the company. Jacob Coxon, who has also worked as a researcher at Anthropic’s chief rival, OpenAI, said he resigned out of concern that Anthropic and OpenAI are “gambling with our lives.” He said the people building AI “earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade.”

While extreme, concerns about the potential for AI to cause human extinction or other catastrophic events are not new in AI research circles. In 2023, for instance, prominent AI researchers and executives, including Amodei and…